“[A co-founder of Zoox, a self-driving car “hopeful”] reached out to some of the biggest names in the field and told them he was making a documentary on the rise of self-driving cars. The plan was to mine these people for information and feel out potential partners…. [He says] ’In my defense I might have been making a documentary.’”[1]

Legal? Yes. Ethical? No! Why? Let’s look at ethical standards in CI:

SCIP’s Code of Ethics requires its members “[t]o accurately disclose all relevant information, including one’s identity and organization, prior to all interviews.”[2] Never happened. Unless he said he “might” be making a documentary, instead of that he was.

The Helicon Group “[n]ever employs questionable data collection activities. These are techniques, otherwise legal, which, if made public, might tend to embarrass Helicon’s reputation or that of a client.”[3] What sort of reputation does this person and his firm have now?

Now, what should these “big names” have done to protect themselves from this individual as well as CI professionals seeking competitively sensitive data? Here are a couple of suggestions for them (and for others):

Check out anyone seeking an interview. Is this person really who/what they say they are? In this case, he was a video producer. Maybe close enough to a documentary maker to skate by.

Do the conditions look and sound right? In this case, the interviewer showed up with a “Canon and a bullshit microphone”. Does that look professional? Probably not.

What is the interviewers approach? This one relied on flattery. Warning! No one is really that interested in what you are doing – except your competition.

What kind of interview is being conducted? This one was two hours long – another warning! After a while, your defenses fall and you speak more freely.

Also, it was conducted in a “grassy field”. Maybe it was sold as a good background for the video. But, it could have been a way to keep this person from his computer or other interruptions that might force him to reconsider “why am I still talking to this person and exactly what am I saying?”

The other evening, I attended a chapter meeting of SCIP. To tell the truth, I was there to plug our new book, Competitive intelligence Rescue: Getting It Right. We had a very fluid discussion among those attending, all very experienced in competitive intelligence.

One of the topics that emerged was Millennials. For the sake of privacy, I will not attribute specific comments to anyone. Besides, some of this contains my interpretation of the impact and meaning of these personal observations.

Here are some of the observations and my comments on them:

Millennials seem to believe that they can easily evaluate the veritable sea of data because they swim in it every day. That often means that they are not interested in a formal analysis of what that data means, i.e., intelligence, but rely on their interpretations, made on the fly. That, in turn, means that they are relatively self-centered in their assessments.

Millennials are cautious about or even suspicious of what they see and hear, being raised in a world surrounded by data that is very often unverified and sometimes inherently questionable. That data ranges from advertising to news sources. Oddly, they are not so cautioous about what they receive from personal sources, which has its own downside.

Millennials tend to gravitate to secondary data when making decisions, since they have the Internet at hand (literally), a magical source of secondary data. But they shy away from accessing primary research data, that is data developed from interviews of relative strangers. That is because they are reluctant to talk with others, particularly those who are not already a part of their own social or work environments. Many strongly prefer to use email or texts to telephone or face-to-face communications. That, of course, means the immediate loss of the context provided by listening for inflections, pauses, as well as watching body language.

All of this bodes poorly for the creation, use, and impact of CI in their day-to-day business activities.

Last week, I noted that a recent business journal article took an academic look at the business use of intelligence contrasted with governmental use[1]. That piece had four criticisms that are relevant to developing CI for your own use or with others on your business team. This week I will deal with the fourth one, and my take on all four:

The fourth is that

“[m]ost companies do not collect the correct information in the most efficient manner”.

and the recommended solution for this is the

“collection of broad range of intelligence including open source (OSINT) and human intelligence (HUMINT) through external organizations. Testing of customer facing employees with target collection campaigns.”

I have to take issue. While external organizations (such as my firm) have much more flexibility in collecting data than do our corporate counterparts, part of the significant difference between government collection of intelligence and corporate collection of CI lies in resources. That is, a team of two or three (private sector) employees (or consultants) cannot be expected to collect, maintain, and continuously analyze the vast amounts of data on a competitor or competitors that an entire team of analysts, supported by a separate team of full-time data collection professionals, in career governmental positions, can generate and maintain.

In addition, the private sector is constrained from many forms of data collection available to the government, so that they rely on a smaller range of options.

For example, signals intelligence, based on the interception of communications, is absolutely barred for the private sector, while it is available, admittedly under certain constraints, to the governmental sector.

Also, corporate policies, as well as CI ethical standards[2], may significantly limit human intelligence activities in the private sector:

Many businesses, properly so, limit or even forbid direct contact with competitors about certain issues including, of course, prices and pricing.

Some, to protect against accidental violations of this standard, even bar one-to-one communication with employees at any competitor.

In addition, CI ethical standards do not permit an employee of one company to collect human intelligence (via elicitation interviews) from competitors by lying about his identity or her employer.

Similar limits do not exist for the government.

Overall, the strong parallels between the governmental collection of and development of intelligence and business’ intelligence activities are increasingly diverging. After years of development, government intelligence culture, tools, analytical and communications protocols differ more from those of CI than they did 30 years ago[3]. That is because the missions, the methodology, the legal constraints, and the total resources devoted to the respective tasking has less and less symmetry (properly so, because there is a difference between losing market share and losing lives). In light of that, I expect that competitive intelligence can and should differ from governmental intelligence both in intelligence collection and analysis, and should be allowed to develop and differ without inappropriate comparisons.

One biggest problems for those of us who are sensitive to the power of competitive intelligence is realizing how much competitively sensitive information from your business is potentially available to your competitors. One of the most interesting things about this is the fact that major problems in this are come most often from two sources:

Senior members of your business that know more competitively sensitive information than others do, but are not sensitive to that. In other words, the higher they are, the more they may inadvertently release.

You.

You? Yes. Let me give you a couple of quotes which I find relevant (and amusing):

From a retired US military officer, just this past weekend, talking to a news reporter about current international developments (I paraphrase) “I’ve talked to many of my friends in the military intelligence establishment, and they are telling me….”

From the fictional British barrister Rumpole of the Bailey: “Lawyers and priests deal largely secrets, being privy to matters which are not meant for the public view. I don’t know how it is in the religious life… but barristers are mostly indiscreet. Go into Pommeroy’s Wine bar [a lawyers’ hangout] any evening with when the Chateau Fleet Street [a cheap wine] is flowing and you may quickly discover who’s getting a divorce or being libelled (sic), which judge got which lady pupil in the club, or which Member of Parliament relaxes in female apparel.”[1]

What they should tell us is that as we become privy to sensitive information, we have a tendency to share it. Unfortunately, we may also lose perspective on with whom we share it, talking with friends, relatives and those with whom we do business, in and out of the company. And then they share it….

Let me give you a short example of what I mean (company name deleted to protect the…speaker):

At an annual meeting of SCIP (then the Society of Competitive Intelligence Professionals, now Strategic and Competitive Intelligence Professionals), the CEO of a large consumer products company addressed a special session of about 150 SCIP members. He was accompanied on stage by his CI team leader.

In his remarks, he described how the company was going to reorganize, with particular emphasis on how that reorganization would eventually impact the CI team as well as all of its various major product lines.

Sitting in front of me were 2 employees from a key competitor, looking shocked. When they recovered, after asking me “Does he know where he is?”[2], they began taking notes with a vengeance.

At the same time, the CI team leader tried to vanish into the chair. You see, the team leader was unaware of the details of the CEO’s remarks – not to mention the fascinating, detailed overheads which accompanied it. The commitment of the CEO was that his speech could be video recorded and made available to all SCIP members, featuring of course, the great overheads. It was. The team leader, following the speech, tried desperately to keep that distribution from happening. All the leader was able to do was get a 3 month delay, thus delaying, but not defeating, my friends in the row ahead of me.

So, in terms of CI security, keep in mind what the cartoon sage of the 60s and 70s, Pogo said: “We have met the enemy and he is us.”[3]

[1] John Mortimer, “Rumpole and the Official Secret”, in The Second Rumpole Omnibus, 1987, p. 513.

[2] He most certainly was warned. The head of CI at another competitor, presiding over the session, introduced the speaker, noting slyly that he was certainly “very, very familiar” with the speaker.

In the most recent issue of Bloomberg BusinessWeek, there is a fascinating article about Amazon.com, “The Secrets of Bezos”. It includes in it a particularly strange statement:

“Amazon has a clandestine group with the name worthy have a James Bond film: Competitive Intelligence.”

The name “Competitive Intelligence” is worthy of James Bond film? Are you kidding me?

James Bond films have much better names than something as mundane as “Competitive Intelligence”. How about an organization such as SMERSH, from the Russian for death to spies? Or SPECTRE (SPecial Executive for Counter-intelligence, Terrorism, Revenge and Extortion)? How can “Competitive Intelligence” compare with Auric Goldfinger, Ernst Stavro Blofeld, Le Chiffre, or Dr. No? Not at all well (unfortunately).

Perhaps the author meant that the concept of “competitive intelligence” is worthy of a James Bond film. No, I doubt that. Tracking how fast and well competitors fill online orders is too plain for a series starring a character with a “license to kill”, working for a character known only as “M”.

How about the fact that one company is checking out its competitors on a regular basis? If the author really means that “competitive intelligence” is such an unusual term for that reason, then we have a major problem – as a character in the movie “Hud” once noted “What we’ve got here is failure to communicate.”

You see, competitive intelligence has been around as a business and academic subject since the 1980s. Since the organization of SCIP, Strategic and Competitive Intelligence Professionals, formerly the Society of Competitive Intelligence Professionals, in the 1980s, many, many books have been written on the subject in several languages,. And, thousands of workshops and seminars on competitive intelligence have been held around the globe by organizations ranging from those covering pricing to strategic planning, and libraries to industrial security.

If anything, a lack of familiarity with “competitive intelligence” may reflect the failure by those of us involved with competitive intelligence to advance its visibility on institutional basis. There is much hard work that is being done by businesses, and based on the article, very effective work, by those involved full time with competitive intelligence and those using competitive intelligence as an effective tool. We just need to do more.

Two interesting pieces raising this question in my mind again. The first was an essay by Ben Gilad, in a SCIP publication, asking whether or not competitive intelligence had become “Googlized”, that is, evolving into a situation where, because of the access to information through the Internet, the practice of competitive intelligence will be in the hands of line managers and not competitive intelligence specialists within large corporations. One key trend underlying this is that many end-users of the competitive intelligence seem to view it as being basically the collection and organization of raw data, and not the critical analysis of that data.

“When President Obama receives his daily intelligence briefing, most of the information comes from government cyberspies, says Mike McConnell, director of national intelligence under President George W. Bush. “It’s at least 75 percent, and going up,” he says.”

Let me dissect why I was taken by the quote. First, it described the president’s intelligence briefing as containing “information”, not intelligence. Second, it indicated that at least 75% of the contents of the daily intelligence briefing came from government cyber spies. In other words, they do not come from open source materials or communications with government employees and diplomats, but rather from hacking into the computers of other nations.

Hacking provides data, sometimes information, and only rarely intelligence. Yet it seems that raw data is now what passes for some intelligence at the governmental level. I doubt that is the universal case, and sincerely hope that is not true. For if it is, then the craft of intelligence, at least at the government’s highest levels is becoming more a matter of repackaging data into information than it is providing truly insightful and actionable analysis.

What do these two pieces have in common? In government we see a possible pattern that is similar to Ben’s observations in business about competitive intelligence managers being replaced by data gatherers, not analysts.

What we need for business to function effectively is not more data, whether from open sources or from government cyber spies, but rather insightful and actionable analysis. That is not provided by overwhelming the end-user with data. In the end, doing that only chokes off decision-making by minimizing or even eliminating analysis. It creates the erroneous impression that one knows what is going on, when all that one has is a mass, or mess, of raw or somewhat digested data.

To draw from another discipline, cooking, there is a huge difference between the meat, vegetables, and other ingredients, the raw data if you will, and the intermediate products as delivered by the prep chef, the trimmed meat, the sliced vegetables, ready for cooking. That is the information. Then the chef converts the intermediate products into Beef Wellington, the meal. Preparing the meal is the equivalent of using analysis to generate intelligence. Right now it seems as if, both in the public and private sector, we are in danger of people confusing raw meat and vegetables, or prepared meat and vegetables, with a gourmet meal. If that is the situation, that is worse than unfortunate.

One of the most perplexing problems facing those in CI is analyzing raw data. It is certainly not for lack of tools. In the bibliography of our book Proactive Intelligence: The Successful Executive’s Guide to Intelligence (brief commercial there), we have listed a couple of very fine works detailing the tools that are most commonly used in analyzing competitive intelligence problems. You should review them when you can.

In addition, there are several excellent books dealing with how to approach analysis itself: Improving Intelligence Analysis – Bridging the gap between scholarship and practice[1],Intelligence Analysis – a Target-centric Approach[2], An Introduction to Intelligence Research and Analysis[3], Intelligence Analysis – Behavioral and Social Scientific Foundations[4], and Analyzing Intelligence – Origins, Obstacles and Innovations[5]. Each of these books is written primarily for the intelligence community, generally governmental. They are very important (as I have said in my reviews), but not for novices. I suggest that sometime in your career you would do well to read one or more of them.

What I’m suggesting is that the experience of many in intelligence, as well as in education, is that analytical ability is not something which can be taught very easily. There are some who argue you cannot teach analytical ability at all. In fact, in the mid-1990s, a group of competitive intelligence professionals and academics, working on a project at the Society of Competitive Intelligence Professionals (SCIP), as Strategic and Competitive Intelligence Professionals was then known, worked out a very thorough outline of “curriculum modules for educational programs in competitive intelligence for use by academics and professional trainers”. Of interest us in this discussion is the fact that, in identifying specific skills necessary to operate within the CI process, they included “analytical ability”, in contrast to what they identified as teachable skills, something developed from professional experience, or something which could be learned through mentoring.

Whether or not that is true, if you have any analytical ability whatsoever, you can improve and enhance it. If you intend to do any significant competitive intelligence, you owe it to yourself to do so. To do that, in addition to knowing what tools are available to you, what you want to develop is a combination of a questioning attitude with the ability to draw insights from other sources beyond those that you are looking at.

I was once asked to suggest a reading list for people who wanted to become involved in CI. My response is that you should be reading all the time. And what is most important, you should be reading things outside of your business, your market space, and even CI. The more widely read you are and the more you challenge your mind, the more you will learn to analyze (or improve existing skills – your choice).

In Proactive Intelligence: The Successful Executive’s Guide to Intelligence, Carolyn Vella and I have some suggestions about getting rid of your blinders by changing what it is you read and what you listen to. In terms of developing analytical abilities, I strongly suggest reading – are you ready for this – mysteries. Not books about spies, but real mysteries. Now I can argue that you would do better to read Agatha Christie and Arthur Conan Doyle, whom I like, than you would James Patterson and Jonathan Kellerman, whom I also like. The point is, as you’re reading, you are following the detective in the story. That entails following the efforts of the hero/heroine to make sense of what appears to be senseless. That does not mean you would even have to agree with how the authors approach the problems or the conclusions that they draw. That’s not the issue. Rather, it is to get yourself in an intellectual frame of mind to analyze something as it unfolds.

Now to see how you’re doing on this learning effort, the next time you hear an unusual story, such as the one with former General Petraeus which is at the moment occupying headlines, ask yourself what five questions does this raise? I’m not asking you to challenge the facts being reported in this case. I’m rather pointing out that you should consider what additional facts might continue to come out. And the reason the facts will continue to come out is that someone somewhere looked at the first set of facts and then asked the next question. That is what you’re training yourself to do. Those questions will eventually lead you to conclusions.

In addition to helping you learn to analyze, reading a good mystery is a great way to relax. And, if you have not learned it yet, mental and physical relaxation can be critical to beginning and then completing a difficult assignment.